What is refresh rate in android

Refresh rate explained: What does 60Hz, 90Hz, or 120Hz mean?

High-end smartphones increasingly boast blazing-fast 90Hz, 120Hz, and even faster refresh rate displays. This sounds great on paper. It’s yet another way that smartphones attempt to differentiate themselves from one another. But should you buy a phone because of this latest display tech trend? It honestly depends.

The benefits of high refresh rate phones and even how they work is rarely well understood. While games and content can look a lot smoother, whether it’s worth the extra battery consumption depends a lot on the user and the handset. With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about display refresh rates.

What is refresh rate?

Displays aren’t static. Content and motion appear smooth on your phone’s screen because every pixel constantly updates to display the latest content from your handset’s processor. But this doesn’t happen randomly. Panels update their content at regular intervals, known as the refresh rate.

The refresh rate measures how quickly the phone’s display updates. In other words, how often and quickly the content on the screen refreshes. Measured in Hertz (Hz), the refresh rate counts the number of times the display fully refreshes every second it is on. A 60Hz display refreshes 60 times per second, 90Hz is 90 times per second, 120Hz is 120 times per second, and so on. So a 120Hz display refreshes twice as fast as a 60Hz panel, and 4x faster than 30Hz.

Faster update times also mean lower latency, because the pixels are being refreshed more often. For example, it takes 16.6 ms to fully refresh a 60Hz display, 11.1ms for 90Hz, and just 8.3ms for a 120Hz rate. Refresh rate isn’t the only factor in round-trip display latency, but it’s the largest contributor.

Your smartphone’s screen doesn’t refresh all at once each cycle though. Instead, each horizontal row of pixels refreshes in turn until the whole display updates at the required rate. You can see this in action if you film a display in slow motion and it’s the reason why displays flicker if you view them through your smartphone camera’s viewfinder. In other words, your display is constantly updating and refreshing, but it takes the cycle time to complete one full refresh.

If you’re interested in seeing how frame rates affect smoothness and motion blur yourself, check out this demo.

A quick note on touch sample rate, a related but different metric. Also measured in Hz, the sample rate tells you how many times per second the touchscreen looks for input from the user’s finger. A higher-touch sample rate means less lag between input (touch or swipe) and action, which is especially important for fast-paced games.

What 60Hz, 90Hz, and 120Hz means for my phone

Higher refresh rate displays make moving content look and feel smoother and snappier. Even swiping through your emails and interacting with Facebook’s UI can look a little smoother than the standard 60Hz rate. Although that’s not a game-changer for day-to-day smartphone use and there are more meaningful benefits to be found in fast motion content, such as video and gaming.

However, lots of video content plays back at the industry standard 24 frames per second or 24Hz. As such, display processing needs to either adapt the frame rate to the content or upscale the content to the frame rate. 120Hz displays are great because they can playback content at 60Hz, 30Hz, and 24Hz with even frame divisions. Other refresh rates require processing when scaling 24Hz video. Poor quality processing can induce judder into your videos, which obviously isn’t good.

Faster displays make a big difference when it comes to gaming too. Higher frame rates and faster display response times can have a noticeable impact because visual latency is lower and gameplay appears smoother. PC gamers regularly swear by 120Hz and even 144Hz displays. Now mobile gamers can benefit too, albeit on a much smaller screen. However, high frame rate gaming requires a beefy, energy-hungry processor too. This ensures that the graphics frame rate keeps up with the high display refresh rate.

Unfortunately, the trade-off with high refresh rates is reduced battery life. During our test on the OnePlus 7 Pro, we noted 200 fewer minutes of browsing time when using the 90Hz mode versus the more standard 60Hz. Newer handsets with more efficient displays provide decent battery life, often thanks to adaptive 90Hz and 120Hz refresh rates. But there’s clearly still a hit to screen on time compared to older 60Hz panels.

As a result, most smartphones offer the option to switch back to 60Hz to save battery life. At the same time, display manufacturing breakthroughs like LTPO panels are helping to improve high-refresh-rate power consumption and offering flexible display rates. The Oppo Find X3 Pro, for example, supports dynamic refresh rates from 120Hz down to 10Hz.

Related video: Does 90Hz really matter?

Should I get a high refresh rate phone?

90Hz and 120Hz displays are now a mainstay in modern smartphones and not just in the ultra-premium market. The feature is also increasingly available in affordable mid-tier handsets as well.

That said, refresh rate is a small part of a smartphone’s display specifications. You shouldn’t buy a fast display is the color are awful, after all. Ultimately, aspects like color gamut, contrast, white point and color temperature, and resolution have an equally large impact on the quality of your phone’s screen. That said, high refresh rates are here to stay and are an increasingly important factor in modern mobile displays.

If you have your heart set on a higher refresh rate, here are just a few of the best phones rocking a high refresh rate panel:

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How to Know the Refresh Rate of a Mobile Screen

In recent months, manufacturers have found a new feature of their mobiles that can serve as a good claim to sell more terminals. It is the refresh rate of the phone, which is increasing and offers us better visual experiences. Well, today we tell you how you can check how many hertz is the refresh rate of your mobile.

We are learning about mobiles that even offer 144Hz screens , designed above all to play as smoothly as possible. Because as you know, precisely at a higher refresh rate, all the animations and transitions of our phone are smoother.

Check it without apps

There are apps on the market that offer us the possibility of knowing if a mobile phone is compatible with this display technology, some even give us standard information on screen values and details among which this refresh rate is. Well, today we propose to meet you with a simple website that is responsible for analyzing the properties of our screen to tell us if we are really enjoying the hertz that the manufacturer promises.

For this, what we must do is enter the web browser of our mobile phone, be it Chrome, Firefox or any other . Once inside we must access the displayhz.com website where we will be able to check these parameters. Automatically, when we enter this website, a check will be made of the screen of the device from which we are browsing, in this case our mobile phone, to show in the upper bar the exact refresh rate at which the screen is working. of the telephone.

Does it match the settings of your mobile?

Although the perception of a screen with a high refresh rate is quite high, we realize just manipulating the interface of the terminal, it is true that we do not always have the certainty that the phone is working at the refresh rate promised by the manufacturer or that we have chosen in the terminal settings themselves. In this way, the actual refresh rate is usually shown when entering the web.

In this case with two different mobiles we have been able to verify that they work at 60Hz and 90Hz respectively , although it always shows us that in this case the rate is 59Hz and 89Hz. It is an easy way to check this feature, both on a mobile phone and on any other device with a screen. In fact, anyone with whom we access this website will be analyzed.

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What does a 120Hz refresh rate do? Smartphone refresh rates explained

A number of manufacturers have added 90Hz and 120Hz displays to smartphones — like the Samsung Galaxy S21 or Google Pixel 6 Pro — and lots of numbers are being thrown around (60Hz, 90Hz, 120Hz), but what do they mean? Most importantly, what will they mean for how you’ll use your smartphone?

Smartphones are getting more and more powerful, but with the last generation’s hardware still holding its own, the jump from generation to generation doesn’t seem as great as it once did. Where are manufacturers to go when a new phone doesn’t feel more powerful than last year’s device? One alternative is to make it feel smoother and more responsive — and a great way to do that is to increase the refresh rate of its display.

If you don’t know why you should get excited about a 120Hz display, then this guide is for you. We’re going to break down what an increase in refresh rate is, how it will benefit your smartphone in the long run, and what exactly the adaptive refresh rate on the Google Pixel 6 range really is.

What is refresh rate?

Before we can explain how a 90Hz or 120Hz display will benefit you, we need to unravel exactly what refresh rate is, and to do that, we need to know how displays work. There’s a lot of technical stuff involved here, but at its most basic level, a display works by showing you a series of images, or “frames.” To make a video, displays need to show a series of frames, one after another. The refresh rate of a monitor is how many times an image is updated per second. So a 60Hz display refreshes its image 60 times a second. This is obviously too fast for your brain to track, so it’s tricked into thinking it is watching a moving image rather than a series of single frames.

A higher refresh rate means more images are shown in the same amount of time, which means any movement between each frame seems smoother. Because there are more frames, it reduces the gap between individual frames. While not something you’re likely to consciously notice, most people can feel some difference between refresh rates. Also, more images mean changes resolve quicker — so your phone will feel more responsive, as it seems to react more quickly to your commands.

It sounds similar to your graphic processor’s frame rate, and that’s because it is. Frame rate is measured in frames-per-second, or fps, and that is how quickly a graphics processor can process and deliver individual images to your display. You’ll need a monitor with a refresh rate of at least 120Hz to display 120 fps at its finest. However, while refresh rate is similar to fps, it’s not the same thing. Refresh rate is tied to the monitor itself, while the frame rate is how quickly information is sent to your monitor by your graphics processor.

What difference will you notice between 60Hz, 90Hz, and 120Hz?

We’ve already covered this in the last section, but it’s worth mentioning again that an increase in smoothness and responsiveness are the primary benefits you’ll get from an increased refresh rate. Scrolling through your apps and swiping across menus will feel smoother and more responsive as a result of the higher refresh rate. Motion blur — the blur you see between actions — will also be reduced as a result of the higher refresh rate.

But a higher refresh rate isn’t just about day-to-day usability. Gaming performance is one of the biggest beneficiaries of a higher refresh rate, and it’s for this reason gaming phones led the charge on higher refresh rates. The Razer Phone 2 and the Asus ROG Phone 2 packed higher refresh rates than normal for a reason, and it’s because a display with a higher refresh rate also has lower input lag. Input lag is the time between an action being triggered on the display and it taking place in the game. A standard 60Hz display cannot have an input lag faster than 16.63 milliseconds because that’s how long it takes for each image to refresh, while a 120Hz display can reach 8.33 milliseconds, as it refreshes twice as often.

If you’re really not sure whether you’ll see the benefit from using a device with a 90Hz or 120Hz display, we recommend heading out to a carrier or manufacturer store and trying out the phone or tablet for yourself. When it comes to refresh rate increases, the proof is really in the pudding, and there’s no way to explain the difference it makes without trying it for yourself.

Does it have downsides?

Like many technological advancements, an increase in refresh rate does come with a few potential pitfalls. The biggest disadvantage is increased battery consumption. Pushing out twice as many frames means an increased burden on the battery, and if your phone struggles with slim battery life at the best of times, you may want to disable the higher refresh rate in order to save juice. The option to disable higher refresh rates is available on most phones with refresh rates higher than 60Hz, and it was particularly useful on the Google Pixel 4, where an already small battery was seriously hampered by the 90Hz refresh rate.

Outside of taxing the battery, a higher refresh rate is just expensive overall. It’s still relatively new tech on smartphones, which means it’s likely to be restricted to flagship devices only for the next few years or so. Outside of specialized devices like gaming phones, don’t expect to see this on budget or midrange phones for the time being.

What is Samsung’s adaptive refresh rate?

Samsung’s new Galaxy S21 range didn’t just introduce a new design, it also debuted a brand new feature for smartphones — display tech with an adaptive refresh rate.

What does this mean? In basic terms, the phone is able to change the refresh rate to match your actions on screen. If you’re looking at a still image, it’ll pull the refresh rate down, as there’s less need to refresh the image every second. Or, if you’re playing a fast-paced game, it’ll ratchet the refresh rate up so you can get the best possible experience out of your game.

Why is this a feature you should be excited about? Changing between refresh rates often requires diving into your Settings menu, but any time you’re looking at a still image, you’re not really getting the benefit of the extra frames. However, it’ll still be pulling extra power from your battery, so giving your phone the ability to intelligently recognize when a higher refresh rate isn’t needed helps to keep battery consumption down.

The refresh rates on offer depend on the model you’re using. The Samsung Galaxy S21 and S21 Plus can access refresh rates between 48Hz and 120Hz, while the Galaxy S21 Ultra can switch anywhere between 10Hz and 120Hz. The wider refresh rate range means the S21 Ultra can push the refresh rate even further down when it’s not needed, saving even more battery.

Do you need a 90Hz or 120Hz refresh rate?

Absolutely not — much in the same way you don’t “need” a camera, flashlight, or pinball game on your smartphone. But anyone who has used a device with a 90Hz or 120Hz refresh rate will tell you the massive difference it makes to the way your device feels. At this point, it is purely a luxury, so if you are content with your current performance speeds, you don’t have to feel any pressure to invest in an improvement that still seems extraneous.

As the pace of technological innovation rushes on, you know that higher refresh rates will soon be the new normal. At the moment, they’re restricted to top-tier devices, like the iPad Pro , top-spec gaming phones, and flagships — but like all hardware, they’ll trickle down the price ranges eventually.

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